I jumped up beside her and said, pleadingly somehow, to them both, "Do you know—I'd forgotten the Milky Way!"
My aunt didn't see any use answering that either. But Kate and I were suddenly laughing and running out together as if we were going to the party after all.
Before we set out, we tiptoed back into Aunt Ethel's room and made off with the roses. Rachel had darkened it. Again I saw us in the mirror, Kate pink and me blue, both our dresses stiff as boards (I had gone straight into Kate's clothes) and creaking from the way Rachel starched them, our teeth set into our lips, half-smiling. I had tried my hat, but Kate said, "Leave that, it's entirely too grand for out there, didn't you hear Mama?" Aunt Ethel stayed motionless, and I thought she was bound to look pretty, even asleep. I wasn't quite sure she was asleep.
"Seems mean," said Kate, looking between the thorns of the reddest rose, but I said, "She meant us to."
"Negroes always like them full blown," said Kate.
Out in the bright, "Look! Those crazy starlings have come. They always pick the greenest day!" said Kate.
"Well, maybe because they look so pretty in it," I said.
There they were, feeding all over the yard and every yard, iridescently black and multiplied at our feet, bound for the North. Around the house, as we climbed with our loads into the car, I saw Rachel looking out from the back hall window, with her cheek in her hand. She watched us go, carrying off her cake and her flowers too.
I was thinking, if I always say "still," Kate still says "always," and laughed, but would not tell her.
Mingo, I learned, was only nine miles and a little more away. But it was an old road, in a part the highway had deserted long ago, lonely and winding. It dipped up and down, and the hills felt high, because they were bare of trees, but they probably weren't very high—this was Mississippi. There was hardly ever a house in sight.
"So green," I sighed.
"Oh, but poor," said Kate, with her look of making me careful of what I said. "Gone to pasture now."
"Beautiful to me!"
"It's clear to Jericho. Looks like that cake would set heavy on your knees, in that old tin Christmas box."
"I'm not ever tired in a strange place. Banks and towers of honeysuckle hanging over that creek!" We crossed an iron bridge.
"That's the Hushomingo River."
We turned off on a still narrower, bumpier road. I began to see gates.
Near Mingo, we saw an old Negro man riding side saddle, except there was no saddle at all, on a slow black horse. He was coming to meet us—that is, making his way down through the field. As we passed, he saluted by holding out a dark cloth cap stained golden.
"Good evening, Uncle Theodore," nodded Kate. She murmured, "Rachel's his daughter, did you know it? But she never comes back to see him."
I sighed into the sweet air.
"Oh, Lordy, we're too late!" Kate exclaimed.
On the last turn, we saw cars and wagons and one yellow wooden school bus standing empty and tilted to the sides up and down the road. Kate stared back for a moment toward where Uncle Theodore had been riding so innocently away. Primroses were blowing along the ditches and between the wheelspokes of wagons, above which empty cane chairs sat in rows, and some of the horses were eating the primroses. That was the only sound as we stood there. No, a chorus of dogs was barking in a settled kind of way.
From the gate we could look up and see the house at the head of the slope. It looked right in size and shape, but not in something else—it had a queer intensity for afternoon. Was every light in the house burning? I wondered. Of course: very quietly out front, on the high and sloping porch, standing and sitting on the railing between the four remembered, pale, square cypress posts, was stationed a crowd of people, dressed darkly, but vaguely powdered over with the golden dust of their thick arrival here in mid-afternoon.
Two blackly spherical Cape Jessamine bushes, old presences, hid both gateposts entirely. Such old bushes bloomed fantastically early and late so far out in the country, the way they did in old country cemeteries.
"The whole countryside's turned out," said Kate, and gritted her teeth, the way she did last night in her sleep.
What I could not help thinking, as we let ourselves through the gate, was that I'd either forgotten or never known how primitive the old place was.
Immediately my mind remembered the music box up there in the parlor. It played large, giltlike metal discs, pierced with holes—eyes, eyelids, slits, mysterious as the symbols in a lady's dress pattern, but a whole world of them. When the disc was turned in the machine, the pattern of holes unwound a curious, metallic, depthless, cross music, with silences clocked between the notes. Though I did not like especially to hear it, I used to feel when I was here I must beg for it, as you should ask an old lady how she is feeling.
"I hate to get there," said Kate. She cried, "What a welcome for you!" But I said, "Don't say that." She fastened that creaky gate. We trudged up the straight but uneven dirt path, then the little paved walk toward the house. We shifted burdens, Kate took the cake and I took the flowers—the roses going like headlights in front of us. The solemnity on the porch was overpowering, even at this distance. It was serene, imperturbable, gratuitous: it was of course the look of "good country people" at such times.
On either side of us were Uncle Felix's roses—hillocks of bushes set in hillocks of rank grass and ragged-robins, hung with roses the size of little biscuits; indeed they already had begun to have a baked look, with little carmine edges curled. Kate dipped on one knee and came up with a four-leaf clover. She could always do that, even now, even carrying a three-layer cake.
By the house, wistaria had taken the scaffolding where a bell hung dark, and gone up into a treetop. The wistaria trunk, sinews raised and twined, like some old thigh, rose above the porch corner, above roof and all, where its sheet of bloom, just starting to go, was faded as an old sail. In spite of myself, I looked around the corner for that well: there it was, squat as a tub beneath the overpiece, a tiger-cat asleep on its cover.
The crowd on the porch were men and women, mostly old, some young, and some few children. As we approached they made no motion; even the young men sitting on the steps did not stand up. Then an old man came out of the house and a lady behind him, the old man on canes and the lady tiptoeing. Voices were murmuring softly all around.
Viewing the body, I thought, my breath gone—but nobody here's kin to me.
The lady had advanced to the head of the steps. It had to be Sister Anne. I saw her legs first—they were old—and her feet were set one behind the other, like an "expression teacher's," while the dress she had on was rather girlish, black taffeta with a flounce around it. But to my rising eyes she didn't look half so old as she did when she was pulled back out of the well. Her hair was not black at all. It was rusty brown, soft and unsafe in its pins. She didn't favor Aunt Ethel and Mama and them, or Kate and me, or any of us in the least, I thought—with that short face.
She was beckoning—a gesture that went with her particular kind of uncertain smile.
"What do I see? Cake!"
She ran down the steps. I bore down on Kate's shoulder behind her. Ducking her head, Kate hissed at me. What had I said? "Who pulled her out?"?
"You surprised me!" Sister Anne cried at Kate. She took the cake box out of her hands and kissed her. Two spots of red stabbed her cheeks. I was sorry to observe that the color of her hair was the very same I'd been noticing that spring in robins' breasts, a sort of stained color.
"Long-lost cousin, ain't you!" she cried at me, and gave me the same kiss she had given Kate—a sort of reprisal-kiss. Those head-heavy lights of Aunt Ethel's roses smothered between our unequal chests.
"Monkeys!" she said, leading us up, looking back and forth between Kate and me, as if she had to decide which one she liked best, before anything else in the world could be attended to. She had a long neck and that short face, and round, brown, jumpy eyes with little circles of wrinkles at each
blink, like water wrinkles after something's popped in; that looked somehow like a twinkle, at her age. "Step aside for the family, please?" she said next, in tones I thought rather melting.
Kate and I did not dare look at each other. We did not dare look anywhere. As soon as we had moved through the porch crowd and were arrived inside the breezeway—where, however, there were a few people too, standing around—I looked and saw the corner clock was wrong. I was deeply aware that all clocks worked in this house, as if they had been keeping time just for me all this while, and I remembered that the bell in the yard was rung every day at straight-up noon, to bring them in out of the fields at picking time. And I had once supposed they rang it at midnight too.
Around us, voices sounded as they always did everywhere, in a house of death, soft and inconsequential, and tidily assertive.
"I believe Old Hodge's mules done had an attack of the wanderlust. Passed through my place Tuesday headed East, and now you seen 'em in Goshen."
Sister Anne was saying bodingly to us, "You just come right on through,"
This was where Kate burst into tears. I held her to me, to protect her from more kisses. "When, when?" she gasped. "When did it happen, Sister Anne?"
"Now when did what happen?"
That was the kind of answer one kind of old maid loves to give. It goes with "Ask me sometime, and I'll tell you." Sister Anne lifted her brow and fixed her eye on the parlor doorway. The door was opened into that room, but the old red curtain was drawn across it, with bright light, looking red too, streaming out around it.
Just then there was a creaking sound inside there, like an old winter suit bending at the waist, and a young throat was cleared.
"Little bit of commotion here today, but I would rather you didn't tell Uncle Felix anything about it," said Sister Anne.
"Tell him! Is he alive?" Kate cried wildly, breaking away from me, and then even more wildly, "I might have known it! What sort of frolic are you up to out here, Sister Anne?"
Sister Anne suddenly marched to the other side of us and brought the front bedroom door to with a good country slam. That room—Uncle Felix's—had been full of people too.
"I beg your pardon," said Kate in a low voice in the next moment. We were still just inside the house—in the breezeway that was almost as wide as the rooms it ran between from front porch to back. It was a hall, really, but still when I was a child called the breezeway. Open at the beginning, it had long been enclosed, and papered like the parlor, in red.
"Why, Kate. You all would be the first to know. Do you think I'd have let everybody come, regardless of promises, if Uncle Felix had chosen not to be with us still, on the day?"
While we winced, a sudden flash filled the hall with light, changing white to black, black to white—I saw the roses shudder and charge in my hands, Kate with white eyes rolled, and Sister Anne with the livid brow of a hostess and a pencil behind one ear.
"That's what you mean," said Sister Anne. "That's a photographer. He's here in our house today, taking pictures. He's itinerant," she said, underlining in her talk. "And he asked to use our parlor—we didn't ask him. Well—it is complete."
"What is?"
"Our parlor. And all in shape—curtains washed—you know."
Out around the curtain came the very young man, dressed in part in a soldier's uniform not his, looking slightly dazed. He tiptoed out onto the porch. The bedroom door opened on a soft murmuring again.
"Listen," said Sister Anne, leaning toward it. "Hear them in yonder?"
A voice was saying, "My little girl says she'd rather have come on this trip than gone to the zoo."
There was a look on Sister Anne's face as fond and startling as a lover's. Then out the door came an old lady with side-combs, in an enormous black cotton dress. An old man came out behind her, with a mustache discolored like an old seine. Sister Anne pointed a short strict finger at them.
"We're together," said the old man.
"I've got everything under control," Sister Anne called over her shoulder to us, leaving us at once. "Luckily, I was always able to be in two places at the same time, so I'll be able to visit with you back yonder and keep things moving up front, too. Now, what was your name, sir?"
At the round table in the center of the breezeway, she leaned with the old man over a ledger opened there, by the tray of glasses and the water pitcher.
"But where could Uncle Felix be?" Kate whispered to me. As for me, I was still carrying the roses.
Sister Anne was guiding the old couple toward the curtain, and then she let them into the parlor.
"Sister Anne, where have you got him put?" asked Kate, following a step.
"You just come right on through," Sister Anne called to us. She said, behind her hand, "They've left the fields, dressed up like Sunday and Election Day put together, but I can't say they all stopped long enough to bathe, ha-ha! April's a pretty important time, but having your picture taken beats that! Don't have a chance of that out this way more than once or twice in a lifetime. Got him put back out of all the commotion," she said, leading the way. "The photographer's name is—let me see. He's of the Yankee persuasion, but that don't matter any longer, eh, Cousin Dicey? But I shouldn't be funny. Anyway, traveled all the way from some town somewhere since February, he tells me. Mercy, but it's hot as churchtime up there, with 'em so packed in! Did it ever occur to you how vain the human race can be if you just give 'em a chance?"
There was that blinding flash again—curtain or not, it came right around it and through it, and down the hall.
"Smells like gunpowder," said Kate stonily.
"Does," agreed Sister Anne. She looked flattered, and said, "May be."
"I feel like a being from another world," I said all at once, just to the breezeway.
"Come on, then," said Sister Anne. "Kate, leave her alone. Oh, Uncle Felix'll eat you two little boogers up."
Not such small haunches moved under that bell-like skirt; the skirt's hem needed mending where a point hung down. Just as I concentrated and made up my mind that Sister Anne weighed a hundred and forty-five pounds and was sixty-nine years old, she mounted on tiptoe like a little girl, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Kate was steering me by the elbow.
"Now how could she have moved him away back here," Kate marveled. Her voice might even have been admiring, with Sister Anne not there.
"Hold your horses while I look at this cake," said Sister Anne, turning off at the kitchen. "What I want to see is what kind"
She squealed as if she had seen a mouse. She took a lick of the icing on her finger before she covered the cake again and set it on the table. "My favorite. And how is Cousin Ethel?" Then she reached for my roses.
"Your ring!" she cried—a cry only at the last second subdued. "Your ring!"
She took my face between her fingers and thumb and shook my cheeks, as though I could not hear what she said at all. She could do this because we were kin to each other.
With unscratchable hands she began sticking the roses into a smoky glass vase too small for them, into which she'd run too little water. Of course there was plumbing. The well was abandoned.
"Well," she said, poking in the flowers, as though suddenly we had all the time in the world, "the other morning, I was looking out at the road, and along came a dusty old-time Ford with a trunk on the back, real slow, then stopped. Was a man. I wondered. And in a minute, knock knock knock. I changed my shoes and went to the door with my finger to my lips." She showed us.
"He was still there, on the blazing porch—eleven-fifteen. He was a middle-aged man all in hot black, short, but reared back, like a stove handle. He gave me a calling card with a price down in the corner, and leaned in and whispered he'd like to use the parlor. He was an itinerant! That's almost but not quite the same thing as a Gypsy. I hadn't seen a living person in fourteen days, except here, and he was an itinerant photographer with a bookful of orders to take pictures. I made him open and show me his book. It was chock-full. All kinds
of names of all kinds of people from all over everywhere. New pages clean, and old pages scratched out. In purple, indelible pencil. I flatter myself I don't get lonesome, but I felt sorry for him.
"I first told him he had taken me by surprise, and then thanked him for the compliment, and then said, after persuasion like that, he could use the parlor, providing he would make it quiet, because my cousin here wasn't up to himself. And he assured me it was the quietest profession on earth. That he had chosen it because it was such quiet, refined work, and also so he could see the world and so many members of the human race. I said I was a philosopher too, only I thought the sooner the better, and we made it today. And he borrowed a bucket of water and poured it steaming down the radiator, and returned the bucket, and was gone. I almost couldn't believe he'd been here.
"Then here today, right after dinner, in they start pouring. There's more people living in and around Mingo community than you can shake a stick at, more than you would ever dream. Here they come, out of every little high road and by road and cover and dell, four and five and six at the time—draw up or hitch up down at the foot of the hill and come up and shake hands like Sunday visitors. Everybody that can walk, and two that can't. I've got one preacher out there brought by a delegation. Oh, it's like Saturday and Sunday put together. The rounds the fella must have made! It's not as quiet as all he said, either. There's those mean little children, he never said a word about them, the spook.
"So I said all right, mister, I'm ready for you. I'll show them where they can sit and where they can wait, and I'll call them. I says to them, 'When it's not your turn, please don't get up. If you want anything, ask me.' And I told them that any that had to, could smoke, but I wasn't ready to have a fire today, so mind out.
"And he took the parlor right over and unpacked his suitcase, and put up his lights, and unfolded a camp stool, until he saw the organ bench with the fringe around it. And shook out a big piece of scenery like I'd shake out a bedspread and hooked it to the wall, and commenced pouring that little powder along something like a music stand. "First!" he says, and commenced calling them in. I took over that. He and I go by his book and take them in order one at a time, all fair, honest, and above-board."